15 Drabbles for 15 Pairings: His Dark Materials
by neuxue
Summary: Title says it all: 15 drabbles of 100 words each, for 15 pairings (romantic and not) from His Dark Materials.


**Lyra/Will**

They walked the worlds together, once. Like gods they commanded universes to open at their whims, truths to unveil themselves at their request, Dust to fall at their love.

They closed the worlds together, once. Like witches they toiled body and soul, to mend the wounds of the earth.

They built the Republic of Heaven together, once. Like mortals they bound themselves to the laws they helped write.

The loved each other, once.

They lost each other, once.

They died together, apart.

But when they meet at the last window, glowing with Dust, nothing else matters, or ever will again.

*****

**Balthamos/Baruch**

With an anguished cry, Balthamos presses his lips to those of the dying man in his arms.

_Stay with me,_ he whispers.

He feels his form dimming, his rank falling, as he pours himself into the man he loves, the angel he will create.

He doesn't care about rank anymore, when he sees Baruch open his golden eyes, spread his faintly glowing wings, hold out a pale hand to his lover.

Balthamos takes his hand and together they rise, no longer an angel and a man doomed to tragic love, but as equals, two angels lit by the rising sun.

*****

**Lee Scoresby + Iorek Byrnison**

By all rights, they should never have met – a farmboy whose dreams carried him away with the wind, and an exiled prince.

Neither of them has any place in a balloon, but theirs is a code of honour and duty, not destiny or fate, should or should not.

Neither of them has any place in this war, and yet they fight all the same, compliant but defiant to the last; a strange sort of pride.

By all rights, they should never have met again. But one last time they defy all laws, comrades-in-arms against the forces of heaven and hell.

*****

**Asriel/Ruta Skadi**

This mortal is different from the others. Ruta Skadi can feel the ambition running through his veins like blood, the power burning in his eyes, the strength in his hands and his soul.

This mortal will not pine. This mortal will not break. This mortal will not fade like a spark in the darkness, but will carry worlds down alongside him with the blaze of a falling star.

She has forgotten many of her lovers. This one may forget her.

_He is only a man_. But for this man there is no _only_.

This mortal will not break her heart.

*****

**Lyra + Ferryman**

The girl's daemon is gone when he returns to the dock, so he never does fulfill his promise.

He continues paddling the boat through the fog, through the years, forward, back, splash, pull, splash, pull.

Some ghosts speak, some are silent. Hopeful, angry, sad, despairing, calm; they all cross.

One stands out. Brighter than the rest, she walks confidently to the edge of the pier. There is no Death by her side, or fear in her eyes as they meet his and she smiles.

For the first time in uncountable millennia, the boatman's eyes widen in surprise.

_She came back._

*****

**Xaphania/Serafina Pekkala**

Serafina has never so felt young. Always she has been the one with eyes full of years and truths her lover would never know. Always she has led.

Now she follows, searching the angel's face for expressions more complex than any human's. Words are not needed here, in the endless sky over the frozen tundra, arms and wings and black cloth tangling with wild passion.

She has never made love with only laughter and abandon, without thoughts of inevitable sorrow.

She cries out with the voice of the north wind, and the angel's touch feels like starlight on her skin.

*****

**Marisa/Asriel**

They have always taken different approaches to the same ends. He wears power like a crown, leaving no one in doubt. She charms her way to the top, leaving everyone to wonder at her ascent.

He builds a fortress and amasses an army to attack the Authority, and dares the worlds to defy him. She faces God's Regent and lies. The abyss claims them both.

They ruled the world, each in their own way. It was only when trying to rule each other that they spoke the same language. Because for them, there was no difference between _lay_ and _lie_.

*****

**Serafina Pekkala + Her Son**

She can still hear his laughter from when she took him above the clouds, his childish pout when she told him he could not fly on his own.

She can still see his expression of awe when he noticed how far Kaisa could go, his pain when his daemon tried to do the same.

She can still feel his child's fingers curled against her palm, his hand on her shoulder when he thought himself a man, his weakening grasp as illness took him.

She can still see the heartbreak in his eyes from when he learned he was not immortal.

*****

**Pantalaimon/Kirjava**

Across the field of tall grass, Lyra holds a red fruit to Will's mouth. Pantalaimon shifts almost without realising it, becoming a lion and seeing Will's daemon do the same. As Lyra's fingers touch Will's lips, the daemons rear onto their hind legs, paws lifting to each other's shoulders.

They fall together.

The two daemons feel the sudden change in the air and stand, looking from side to side before staring at each other in simultaneous realisation. They shift in unison again, looking to the sky as birds and seeing the Dust fall and settle around them.

They fly together.

*****

**Mary Malone + Atal**

Mary first put pen to paper with a scientist's precision, and the result would have pleased and fascinated any biologist.

She crumpled it up before taking up her pen again and sinking into the trancelike state in which she could read the I Ching.

Hours later she found herself looking not at a mulefa, but a zalif. Atal shone out through the eyes, the soft twist of the trunk.

Pinning the drawing to the wall, blinking back unexpected tears, she wondered why it was so easy to love across distances that could never be bridged without tearing the universe apart.

*****

**Tialys/Salmakia**

Tialys listens to his brave, beautiful partner comforting the child, and grieves for the love that may have been possible once, had the universes not interfered.

As they walk beside ghosts through the dark, he knows their own lives are drawing to a close.

But standing in front of the window to a moonlit paradise, he knows he cannot regret giving up the chance of loving her if it means never seeing her trapped in the world of the dead, robbed of her voice and her spirit.

When the time comes, he accepts death's embrace as if it were hers.

*****

**Lyra/Billy Costa**

He is not Will, he is not even Roger. But he is a child of Bolvangar, and knows her story better than most in this world.

Kissing Billy Costa on the deck of his boat, she can almost remember the Lyra who learned gyptian words from his brothers and threw snowballs in the face of his fears, who had never unwittingly betrayed a friend.

The Lyra who had never met Will.

She wonders if Will is kissing someone else but thinking of her and wishing.

_I'm sorry,_ she says, breaking the kiss and stepping away. _But I made a promise_.

*****

**Elaine/John Parry**

He does not want to leave her, but she smiles at him with no trace of shadows in her eyes, kisses him and tells him their son will take care of her until he returns.

He sends his letters and love, hoping they will be enough to keep the darkness at bay.

Even as he travels on, his thoughts are full of what he left behind.

It is only in the instant before he dies that he recognises his son's face, and understands what it means that Will has followed in his footsteps, has found him here.

Elaine is alone.

*****

**Iorek + Lyra**

The aurora dances overhead as Lyra disembarks from the zeppelin late in the Arctic night as she has on this day for the last ten years.

Will's farewell, Iorek's triumph; her years are measured in promises and memories, even as the world counts from Authority's End.

An unfamiliar bear greets her and Lyra asks to be taken to King Iorek. For a moment there is silence.

_It's King Enar Janesson now_.

And Lyra allows herself to cry for the bear, the king, the friend who named her, who carried her to the stars, who forged the tools of her destiny.

*****

**Will + Mary Malone**

It is not quite a ritual, not like Midsummers Day, but Will knows Mary visits the Botanic Garden weekly to tend to the seeds that have now become saplings, and Mary knows he will be there, his fingers tracing the name he carved on the bench with a fragment of the knife's blade.

Sometimes they talk. But other times, like today, they sit in silence. Some things do not need to be said. Some cannot.

Without speaking, Mary pulls a punnet of berries from her bag.

A faint smile touches Will's face as he holds out a box of marzipan.


End file.
